The Strangers by Naomi Alderman review – where has this odd new species come from?

A bereavement memoir mingles with speculative fiction, in a wise and ragged examination of grief from the author of The Power

In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein alludes to an incident that followed the death of Franz Schubert. He recalls that Schubert’s brother cut several scores into small pieces, each consisting of only a few bars of music, and handed them out to Schubert’s favourite pupils. This, Wittgenstein argues, was a totally understandable act of grief. He goes on to suggest, however, that if, in his grief, Schubert’s brother had left the scores untouched, or even burned them, then that too would be equally legible to us. Such is the disorienting nature of loss – in its wake, anything goes.

In The Strangers, Women’s prize-winning author Naomi Alderman tests this thesis to its limits. How about dealing with grief by writing an uneasy memoir/speculative fiction hybrid about the sudden appearance of a new species of quasi-badgers that seem to improve the quality of local soil?

Well, it turns out Wittgenstein was right. The Strangers, despite (or perhaps because of) its many ragged idiosyncrasies, is a remarkably successful evocation of loss. Narrated by “the novelist Naomi Alderman”, who is mourning both her recently deceased mother and a series of failed pregnancies, the book ranges incisively across the vast affective terrain bequeathed to those who go on living: despair, disorientation, solipsism, petulance, regret, resignation … the list goes on. After all, grief is not an emotion – it is all the emotions, all at once.

And by braiding the memoir within a subtly unnerving tale of eco-horror infestation, Alderman substantially raises the philosophical and symbolic stakes. It is a high-risk, sporadically successful manoeuvre, but one that recognises the gravity of the task at hand. In the same way that a gravestone is an attempt to give form to an absence, Alderman’s structural ingenuity allows the reader to wrangle some of the ineffable aspects of grief into something more coherent and bounded.

The plot itself is simple enough, and relatively small fry compared to some of Alderman’s previous work, such as thwarting the techno-apocalypse (The Future) or upending the global gender hierarchy (The Power). A new type of species is discovered, a flat-faced and long-nosed mammal that comes to be known as a mimmoth. They remain largely inscrutable to humans: hard to photograph, even harder to capture, and seemingly responsible for a range of positive ecological changes. Their inscrutability cuts both ways, however, and soon enough the mimmoths are the subject of conspiracy theories and hate campaigns, worship and veneration, floating signifiers swept up into the insatiable polarisation of the present. To some they are harbingers of a better future, sent to teach us how to care for one another and the planet, while to others they are “invaders, genetic freaks, not natural”.

On the whole, Alderman handles the fairly obvious political allegories with a lightness of touch that prevents them from collapsing into polemic, sketching out our political and media environment with the skill of a practised world-builder. The failing institutions of British life are a “Potemkin village” stripped of their engine and replaced with “a clockwork mechanism, slowly running down”. There are occasional moments, however, that seem transplanted from another era entirely; one when people’s political subjectivities were formed by front pages and evening news bulletins, and not by unchecked genocide livestreamed to their phones.

Fundamentally, though, The Strangers is a deeply moving and wise book, asserting the painful truth that we simply do not get to choose the things that we lose. When the narrator wonders if she has fallen prey to “mimmoth-psychosis”, the delusion that one has a uniquely intimate relation with the mysterious creatures, I was put in mind of Judith Butler’s observation about grief being a site of temporal reorganisation, a crucible in which our selfhood can be undone and remade. Both Alderman and Butler seem to remind us that while despair may temporarily convince us otherwise, life, in all its terrifying potential, stubbornly persists.

That the mimmoths’ arrival coincides with an upsurge in mushroom-like fungus seems particularly telling. Among its many miraculous properties, mycelium contains within it a biological code of deep sociality and connectivity, existing as a network that is constantly reallocating and rebalancing resources, moving nutrients symbiotically between the old and the young, the weak and the strong. The political metaphor contained therein has proved irresistible to many commentators. But in The Strangers, Alderman asks whether there is also a parallel to be drawn in how we allocate our resources of attention and love more proximately. How do we mediate between the existing potential of our own lives, the expired potential of the dead and the unrealised potential of the never or nearly born? It is the type of intractable question one can only ever hope to live alongside. Or, as “the novelist Naomi Alderman” puts it, “I do not wish my ghosts away.”

• The Strangers by Naomi Alderman is published by Fig Tree (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.